THE ANCIENT SURVIVAL: THE BALI AGA

At one time the island was populated by pure Indonesians, an ancient people who filed and blackened their teeth. They lived in small communities, family clans ruled by a council of Elders who acted as the priests of their religion. Their cult centred in the worship of the powerful spirits of nature, and especially those : their ancestors, with whom they continued to live, a great of both the dead and the living.

Occasionally, by means of mediurns and sacrifices, they brought their ancestral spirits down to this earth to protect them. They buried their dead or simply abandoned them in the jungle to be carried away by the spirits, and it is possible that they even ate parts of the bodies in order to absorb the magic power inherent in their ancient headmen.

The pure descendants of these people, calling themselves Bali Aga or Bali Wula, the " original " Balinese, still live, isolated and independent, in the mountains where they found refuge from imperialistic strangers. Hidden in the hills of East Bali, near Karangasem, lies the village of Tenganan, where the most conservative of the Bali Aga preserve the old traditions with the greatest zeal.

Tenganan is a rabidly isolated community, socially and economically separate from the rest of Bali, almost a republic in itself. It is shut off from the world by a solid wall that surrounds the entire village, which is meant to keep outsiders away, and is broken only by four gates, each facing one of the cardinal points. Of these gates, three open to the gardens and plantations of the village, but the main gate is so narrow that a stout person has difficulty in squeezing through. Such is the obsession for isolation in Tenganan that there is an official specially appointed to sweep the village after the visits of strangers, to obliterate their footprints.

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